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Six degrees of separation

I’ve heard of the Six degrees of separation theory for a couple of times now, but I’ve watched a tv show that enlightened me a bit and I’d like to talk about it more.

For everyone who doesn’t know, this theory tells that everyone is connected with eachother with 6 or fewer steps. A “friend of a friend” type of deal.

The first time this theory blew up was with a web game named “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” back in the 90’s, where you could link any Hollywood actor to Kevin Bacon with 6 relations or less.

Going back to the show, what I found interesting is that this theory applies on everything. Here’s a snippet from an article talking about the brain:

“[…] we have something like a hundred billion of those brain cells, and they’re connected in some intricate way that makes them phenomenally powerful as a group. And if you ask, do they obey a six degrees of separation principle? They do. That is, we haven’t mapped out the brain, but from studying simpler nervous systems of other creatures, we know that every brain cell, or every neuron, is just a few synapses, a few connections away from every other. […]”1

There’s something comforting knowing that as big and complex this world is, everything is connected in a much smaller path than you’d think.